University of Vermont study examines biracial identity

Dec. 28, 2010

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Even though he was born of a white mother and an African father, Barack Obama is commonly referred to as the first black president. That's a sign, sociologists say, that America's "one-drop rule" -- a vestige of the United States' segregationist past -- is still with us.

Under the one-drop rule, a person with even minimal African ancestry (one drop of black blood) was considered black. In the Jim Crow South, such people were denied the rights and opportunities accorded to whites -- unless they had sufficiently light skin and Caucasian features to conceal their African ancestry and "pass" themselves off as white.

Racial "passing" still takes place today, University of Vermont sociologist Nikki Khanna reports in a new study, but in different ways. Light-skinned people with African ancestry might pass themselves off as white or as black, depending on the situation. And biracial people with one white parent and one black parent are more likely for various reasons to identify themselves as black and even to conceal their white ancestry, Khanna said.

A person's racial identity is determined not just by society; it also can be self-defined. Even people who regard themselves as biracial often are inclined to pass themselves off as monoracial, Khanna reports in an article, co-written with Cathryn Johnson of Emory University, published recently in Social Psychology Quarterly.

"While passing during the Jim Crow era involved passing as white," they write, "we find a striking reverse pattern of passing today -- only a few respondents situationally pass as white, while the majority of respondents describe situations in which they pass as black."

The precise degree of racial intermingling in this country is unknown. By some estimates, 75 percent to 90 percent of African-Americans have some white blood, Khanna said, adding that nobody knows what share of the white population might be oblivious to a distant, long-concealed black ancestry.

When one parent self-identifies as black and the other as white, the offspring sometimes wrestle with how they want to define themselves racially. Khanna interviewed 40 such offspring -- mostly middle class and of college age, in the South -- for the journal article.

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Among them was a young woman who said she identified herself as white in the workplace "to get ahead" but as black in college because she thought she would qualify for more financial aid.

"We find that the majority of respondents in this sample, who generally identify themselves to others as biracial or mixed, occasionally pass as black when they perceive some advantage to doing so," the authors write.

Other motivations for passing as black -- or for concealing one's white heritage -- would be to fit in with a black peer group and to avoid the stigma that whiteness might carry in such groups. Respondents told Khanna they made an effort in some situations to speak and dress in certain ways to be perceived as black.

The propensity to pass as black might not be an entirely new phenomenon, Khanna said. It could date back to the Black Pride movement of the '60s and '70s, she said, but it hasn't received much scholarly attention until fairly recently.

In the early part of the 20th century, tens of thousands of light-skinned African-Americans every year are believed to have been passing for white to evade Jim Crow discrimination, Khanna said. "In the 1920s, people didn't use the terms biracial or multiracial," she said. "It was 'mulatto.'" And mulatto was considered black.

The fact that "biracial" and "multiracial" have entered common American parlance suggests that the "one-drop rule" might be weakening, Khanna said. The U.S. census, beginning in 2000, allowed respondents to choose more than one race.

Still, the widespread perception that people with one black parent are black has its roots in a historically racist attitude that "one drop of black blood made one black, but one drop of white blood did not make one white," as Khanna and Johnson put it.

Khanna, daughter of an Indian father and a white mother, grew interested in interracial studies in graduate school. She said she noticed that research was lacking on the offspring of interracial couples.

Now she's interested in exploring how self-defined racial identities relate to affirmative action programs. Being biracial is enough to qualify for many such programs, but many of Khanna's respondents identified themselves as black in applications, leaving out information about their white backgrounds.

Should monoracial and multiracial people be equally eligible for affirmative action benefits? The article suggests another line of inquiry:

"Future research should explore American public opinion regarding biracial and multiracial people (those with one white parent) and their inclusion in affirmative action programs," the article states.

Contact Tim Johnson at 660-1808 or tjohnson@burlingtonfreepress.com. To have Free Press headlines delivered free to your e-mail, sign up at burlingtonfreepress.com/newsletters.